AuthorTopic: Animals (And why we love them) (Read 3901 times)

I swear there was a thread where this kind of stuff had been posted before, but I couldn't find it.

Anyway, couple of things to share. This I watched when it originally aired on our local PBS station last. It's called Dogs Decoded and confirms just about everything every dog owner/lover has ever said was true about their pets that scientists have thought was bull. There's also a very interesting Border Collie discussed, and more depth on the Russian fox project pretty much all of us know about that explored domestication. It's cool! Watch it here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/dogs-decoded.html

Second is something else I watched when it aired originally about research on the significant intelligence of crows/ravens (genus corvus) and that they may very well be more intelligent than most primate species. Something I didn't like about it as a linguist-in-training, that I had to explain to my mother after it was over, was communication versus language. The show, and scientists in the show, seem to make out that what they were testing would be ground breaking - whether or not a young crow could recognize a specific mask that his parents knew as someone bad. That kind of learning has already been tested and proved in other species, including many bird species. This is something I learned in my lingusitics foundational class a year ago. That is communication, all species almost down to the single celled have this. What they were not testing, the actually ground breaking thing, was if the young crows could learn about something WITHOUT being exposed to it. That would have proved language as they would be communicating about past and future and abstract ideas, something that only humans do.

Just finished watching this an hour ago. Pretty interesting if a little scattered and not that in depth. But then again, that' s half the point of the show: we really don't know much of anything about wolverines, so a lot of this stuff is all there is to share. Still plenty of cool stuff though, especially about the family structure.